The Enneagram? Auntie Anne’s? What?

Remember the stress you had each year choosing “what you would be” for Halloween? You may have come from a make-your-own-costume family, but a lot of us were taken to a store where mom told us to “choose a mask.” Your selection may have included a witch, Frankenstein, and Casper. You chose your mask and put it on for Trick-or-Treating on Halloween.

As I look back at my childhood, I now realize it wasn’t just in late October that I put on a mask. As children we begin to realize that this world is not a safe place. We get hurt by someone, perhaps embarrassed or offended, and it does not feel good … at all. What do we do? We choose a mask. We start to put a personality mask over our true selves. We choose personality traits that we believe can protect us from pain and please the people who matter to us. The problem is that this false self we project can become a prison. We can lose touch with our most authentic self.

So, what should we do? As a therapist you might expect me to suggest counseling and yes, I would. But I would also recommend digging into the Enneagram.

The Enneagram?

The Enneagram is an ancient personality typing system. There are other personality tests out there – you may have taken one that said you were a yellow, or a C-S, or phlegmatic, an ENTJ, or a Golden Retriever. They are all helpful but what makes the Enneagram unique is that while others focus on external behavior, the Enneagram focuses on what’s going on inside a person and, perhaps more important, why.

Perhaps one time you heard someone mention the Enneagram and thought they were talking about the pretzel place at the mall. When you realized they didn’t say Auntie Anne’s, but Enneagram you may have decided you weren’t interested. A personality test didn’t sound as appetizing as a cinnamon sugar covered soft pretzel.

I get it, but maybe you should get to know the Enneagram. Why? Well, in a word, freedom. Actually, I’ll give you another word – compassion. The Enneagram can lead you to have compassion on yourself and others and to identify the masks you wear – finally understanding how your childhood wounds have shaped who you are today - and even to take those masks off so you can leave that prison and become free.

Thomas Merton wrote, “Sooner or later we must distinguish between what we are not and what we are. We must accept the fact that we are not what we would like to be. We must cast off our false, exterior self like the cheap and showy garment that it is. We must find our real self, in all its elemental poverty, but also in its great and very simple dignity: created to be the child of God, and capable of loving with something of God’s own sincerity and his unselfishness.”

Let me be clear: The goal of the Enneagram is not to lose your personality or put on a new one. The purpose is, in the words of Ian Morgan Cron, “to develop self-knowledge and learn how to recognize and de-identify with the parts of our personality that limit us so we can be reunited with our truest and best selves” in hopes of “growing beyond the self-defeating dimensions of our personality, as well as improving relationships and growing in compassion for others.”

That … would be awesome! So, let’s do it!

There are all kinds of ways you can do a deep dive into the Ennegram – online, or by reading a book, like the one by Ian Morgan Cron, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery

To get you started, I’m going to share a series of blog articles on the Enneagram that I hope can give you a helpful orientation and a plan for growth. My next article will be on the nine Enneagram personality types so you can begin to identify which “mask” you wear. Speaking of, it’s almost October, so if you have a little one, you might want to start thinking about a Halloween mask too (assuming COVID-19 doesn’t cancel Halloween this year)!